It has become relatively common for individuals to possess a number of different devices through which they communicate. For example, a person may have a home telephone, a wireless telephone, a pager, a personal digital assistant (PDA), and an office telephone to name a few. As the population becomes increasingly mobile, making contact with a person through one of these communication devices has become more difficult.
Call forwarding is one method of addressing this problem. Certain telephone systems allow users to enter another number to which a voice call is forwarded if not answered by a specified number of rings. This should allow an individual with multiple telephone devices to forward the call to such devices until the telephone at which the individual is located finally rings. However, if several telephones are involved, this approach becomes complicated. Moreover, it requires the calling party to remain on the line for a significant period of time if the call is to be forwarded multiple times. Furthermore, it is necessary that call forwarding capabilities exist on each of the individual's telephones. In addition, this approach requires that all telephones involved be reprogrammed each time an individual desires to initiate call forwarding.
A significant drawback to this forwarding strategy is that, in each leg of the forwarded call, the calling party is terminated on the last device or network in the chain. It follows that the final number in the forwarding scheme is responsible for all available enhanced services or voicemail available to the caller. Accordingly, although a call may have been initially placed to an office telephone equipped with voicemail and/or operator assist, all such enhanced services of the corporate network are lost once the call is forwarded off the corporate PBX (e.g., to the user's wireless telephone).
Travel can exacerbate the difficulty of establishing communication with a team of individuals because of the lack of communication options. Unfortunately, this forces a calling party to decide which person from amongst a team to contact and in which order to do so.
The office telephone is the primary point of contact of most business people and most business features. Typically, corporations invest significantly in their office telephone infrastructure, which often includes voicemail, paging, unified messaging systems and conference calling. In addition, most corporations have negotiated contracts with their telephone carriers (e.g., local and long distance carriers) to ensure that they obtain the lowest possible rates for calls placed via their corporate network. However, because the corporate workforce is becoming increasingly mobile, more business people are using wireless telephones or devices to conduct their business when they are out of the office. This has resulted in corporations spending a larger portion of their telecommunications budget on wireless communications, with far less favorable negotiated rates than the rates of their corporate network. In addition, wireless communication systems often lack the enhanced conveniences (e.g., interoffice voicemail, direct extension dialing, etc.) that corporate users have come to expect in the office environment.
Another valuable feature allowing people in different locations to communicate with each other is a conference call (also referred to as a teleconference). A conference call allows multiple participants to be present on a single call regardless of their locations. To arrange a conference call, a user typically must acquire a call-in conference number from a conferencing service, schedule a time for the conference, obtain a password or number for the conference and send the password/number to all invitees. All invitees are required to call the call-in number at the appropriate time and provide the password/number to initiate/join the conference call. Using this typical technique, however, could take a long period of time for all invitees to join the call, which may delay the start of the call. This technique also requires some logistics to arrange the call and may become burdensome if additional information must be forwarded to the invitees. Thus, another method for arranging a conference is desired.